* Posts by Pablo

348 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2009

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O2 boots up boobies blocker

Pablo
Flame

Or you could just stop being Nazis

Yeah, that would work too, huh?

Europe confirms raids on ebook publishers

Pablo

I don't think you understand

Publishers can charge retailers any stupid price they want, yes, but they don't have a right to tell the retailer how much they should resell it for. At least, that's how it works with real books, I've yet to be convinced there's any reason beyond greed why it should be different with the virtual kind.

Penthouse pokes punters in eye with 3D smut

Pablo
Boffin

@Bill Neal

Because, color separation (anaglyph) is the only method that works on a standard monitor*. I assume the actual broadcast would use one of the newer technologies.

*Well there's also the Pulfrich effect, but that relies on the camera continuously panning across the scene in one direction, with minimal other motion. Not really suitable for porn.

Apple fanbois leak secrets of Mac OS X Lion

Pablo
Jobs Halo

eww, nits

I assume they meant "It will use less space than saving a whole second copy which you would have to do otherwise since overwriting the original would be horrible.", but thought that was too obvious to mention.

Pablo
Troll

Oh wow!

"windows resizeable from any corner or side"

Between this in the multi-button mice, they've almost caught up to Windows 3.11!

German data regulators move to tighten IP address laws

Pablo
Headmaster

Fine points of the law...

So I'm curious. If I embed an ad in my page, and the ad itself is hosted by an advertising network, that means the user's browser will have to fetch it from there, thus revealing it's IP address. Would that be a violation of this law?

Because if so, I would have to host all the ads myself, coordinate that with the people you're paying for them and somehow convince them to trust me that their ad is really being displayed to as many people as I say. That sounds almost completely unworkable, especially for smaller websites.

On the other hand, if that *doesn't* count as sharing user IPs with advertisers, the law is basically worthless, since the end result is the same.

Customs officers get X-ray machines for down under searches

Pablo

It's a lot when it happens to you

But anyway, you KNOW they're going to do it more often now that they have their own scanner to play with.

Conviction overturned for abuse images bought from bookshop

Pablo

Is there an ECLU?

Countering that strategy is basically why the ACLU was formed: to defend "losers" (even famously NAMBLA) when the case could set a precedent too important to leave up to loser-level-lawyers.

I wonder if the UK or Europe has any similar organization.

Pablo

Objective standards? Who knew?

I wonder if the jury was allowed to know the books were commercially available. I could easily imagine a prosecutor arguing that was irrelevant and convincing the judge they only needed to see a selection of the "worst" pictures instead of the whole books.

Pablo

No, I think they did ask

And the answer they came up with was this: "Well, we've been selling it for years, surely if there was a problem the police would just kindly tell us to take it off the shelves."

Is that so unreasonable?

Bionic leg builder makes huge step in prosthetics

Pablo
Coat

Alright

I'm just gonna ask the question we've all been wondering. Will this enable the user to do a karate kick with superhuman strength?

Protecting users from themselves

Pablo
Stop

Speaking as a user

Please don't. Seriously. Protect us from other people. Protecting us from ourselves is a waste of time, kind of like checking airline pilots for bombs.

Apple 'outstrips' all brands at box office

Pablo
Jobs Horns

30% you say?

How a strangely appropriate.

Westboro Baptist Church taunts Anonymous over supposed attack plan

Pablo

Bad comparison

Assisted suicide is still illegal, assisted security testing of a website is not.

Government defends need for census

Pablo

That's the reasonable part

I don't think anyone objects to *that* part. At least that was the case in the US, even the tin foil types understand the use of a basic headcount, and don't usually have a problem with that (plus it's in the constitution). What people object to are the really detailed biographical questions, especially because there are just so many of them.

Our census made, in my opinion, a good choice to trim it back to the basics. They still ask race, but that's about the only thing that could be really be considered "personal". Other than that it was essentially just "How many people live here and how are they related to you?".

I understand they will use other, presumably voluntary, methods to collect a sampling of the more detailed kind of information.

Unprecedented domain seizure shutters 84,000 sites

Pablo
Stop

Exactly

“My understanding is mooo.com was a hosting site on some level, so saying they took out 84,000 sites is like saying they'd seize 100 million sites if they seized facebook.com.”

And would that be an unreasonable thing to say? Would it be right to deprive 100,000,000 people of a constitutional right because a few of them broke the law?

I don't pretend I completely understand what happened here. But whether it was hosting, DNS, or what have you, it's clear that ICE acted without any regard for the collateral damage they were causing.

Anna Chapman to design Russian space uniforms

Pablo

Who would have thought

That getting busted by the FBI could provide such a boost to your career prospects. Actually, I guess it works for hackers sometimes too.

US robot ornithopter spy-hummingbird in flight test triumph

Pablo
Thumb Up

Whoa!

And it actually looks like a humming bird. Nice touch. I wasn't expecting that.

Microsoft bans open source license trio from WinPhone

Pablo
FAIL

Way to go Nokia!

(Note the sarcasm.)

Humans shamed in round two of Jeopardy! showdown

Pablo

I agree

Surely it wouldn't have been that hard to give Watson a mechanical actuator to physically press a the button. Granted this would only cost it a few milliseconds, but it would definitely be fairer. Or has Jeopardy ever made similar adjustments for disabled human contestants? Say someone with no arms.

Twitter off-limits for cricketers

Pablo
WTF?

Huh?

Why is Twitter banned specifically? Surely if you were trying to fix a game you would do so by private text message rather than "microblogging" it to the world anyway.

US Secret Service tabletop training toytown goes virtual

Pablo
Thumb Up

RE: Damn Title

That would be Second Life, or "Sadville" as El Reg idiosyncratically refers to it.

And yeah, that would probably work fine actually, although they would need a private server to prevent spies (and flying penises) from intruding on their training sessions.

Sex offenders will get a review – after 15 years

Pablo
Stop

[citation needed]

This factoid, that sex offenders have an exceptionally high recidivism rate, is oft repeated and seldom supported. At best it's true for specific types of sex offenders. But even then, I think you'll find other crimes with a higher recidivism rate still.

Unfortunately, good stats on this are somewhat hard to come by, but heres one source:

http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=2392

One interesting trend according to that source is that severity of the crime seems to be inversely correlated with reconviction rates. And that means conviction for any crime, not just the same one. So for instance murderers have a lower reconviction rate that rapists, who in turn have a lower reconviction rate than burglars.

Gadget makes bombs, mines go off 'on average' 20m away

Pablo
Boffin

Possibly...

But it sounds like it only works on electrically triggered mines, while the really old ones lying around would more likely be purely mechanical.

Steelseries World of Warcraft mouse and keyboard

Pablo
Unhappy

I do love many-buttoned mice

But lately I've been very frustrated with how fast even high end mice wear out, and more buttons means more things to break. Last time this happened I finally gave up and got the cheapest five-button mouse I could find (Pixxo ML-G135, if anyone cares), so at least I won't feel like I got ripped off if it breaks within a year. And aside from feeling strangely light in my hand, it's done fine so far.

I suppose a true fan might be okay with buying a pricey mouse every year or two, or maybe this one is built to last, but having been burned before my first thought seeing that thing was "Wow, I bet that would be really sweet until half the buttons break and drive you insane." Hopefully I'm wrong.

Google, MS, Mozilla: Three 'Do Not Tracks' to woo them all

Pablo

Each of these systems has merits

Mozilla's is very slick and simple, and ultimately comes closest to paralleling the do-not-call list that obviously inspired this. But of course that's only if it catches on, at the moment, it doesn't mean a thing.

Microsoft's is the only one backed up but technological measures, but to me, this doesn't sound anything like a do-not-track list at all. It sounds more like a shared kill-file, which IMHO is a great thing to build into a browser, but it's not a do-not-track list.

Google's solution is somewhere in between, it's not exactly enforced, but it works with existing cookie-based opt-out systems, so it can be expected it will at least do some good right away. On the other and, I don't see it as much of a step forward, it's kludge really.

Card surcharges face super-complaint

Pablo
Go

Card? surcharges? face? super?-complaint?

Can we please get Yahoo! style punctuation for future stories about this stupidly named org?

Mysterious crypto-book dated to 15th century

Pablo

Hoax?

Couldn't it still be a modern (well century old) hoax written on older paper*? That might sound a little far fetched, but if *I* found a stack of 500-year-old blank paper I'd sure as hell be tempted.

Microsoft sends IE9 'do-not-track' tech to W3C

Pablo
Headmaster

Try reading the two words right before that

"advertisers interests"

Ohhhhhhhhh! Now you get it?

The Meeks shall inherit the Office ...

Pablo
Thumb Up

Speaking of branding

OpenOffice isn't actually named OpenOffice. It's named OpenOffice.org, which is an utterly terrible name, right up there with iSnack 2.0. Even if you have difficulty pronouncing Libre for some reason, it's still incomparably better than having a fugly TLD growing out of the name.

iPhone owners get walked through confessional

Pablo
Thumb Down

Lame

So why can't they actually connect you with a priest? Surely there must be some bored priests out there somewhere.

Google does fractals in HTML5

Pablo
Thumb Down

Yes, it is.

But to clarify, they didn't do it in HTML5, they did it by massively abusing JavaScript.

AOL buys Huffington Post

Pablo
Pint

Unless...

they step onto a supersonic jet traveling at the same speed.

Overzealous anti-paedo scheme not dead yet

Pablo

Hold on

That paragraph WAS talking about the old VBS, wasn't it? That colon-contract that started it off was a little confusing, but that's how I read it. If petty crimes won't be on the new one, presumably non-crimes won't either.

ISPs and Vaizey set to bump heads over default porn filter

Pablo
Badgers

And it gets better

One kind of site that DEFINITELY has to be kept off the safe list is anything with unmoderated user-generated content. So that's like... every popular site on the internet.

Pablo
Big Brother

Of course

"Children's" charities are the undisputed masters of newspeak. War is peace, opt-out is opt-in, restrictions are rights.

Scanner snares senior servant

Pablo
WTF?

That's insane

“Pirated software and/or material; racist material; pornography; or LINKS TO SUCH MATERIAL.”

So even if he really had been searching for door knockers, he would have still been fired when some of Google's results inevitably pointed to the other kind?

Mac App Store: Developer godsend or Evil Empire?

Pablo
Troll

Let me be the first to ask the obvious question:

How long until Apple does away with the ability to install software by other means?

Republican reps push for mandatory gun ownership

Pablo

@Raggs

Because Obamacare is NOT nationalized healthcare. It's simply a requirement that each person buy health insurance from one of the same miserable insurance companies that already exist. This is directly analogous to forcing people to buy any other product.

Same thing, it's reasonable for the government to take your tax dollars and buy guns (for the military, police, etc) but it's not reasonable to force YOU to personally buy a gun.

Boots punts over-the-counter paternity test

Pablo
Boffin

Could be...

Or maybe cousins really do have only a slightly elevated risk of birth defects, just as scientists always suspected.

But why let facts get in the way or your prejudice?

Pablo
Flame

This anti-testing faction is infuriating

It's MY DNA dammit, it's none of their business what I do with it or authorize someone to do with it. If I want to send it off to have someone estimate how closely related to Elvis I am, or check it for secret codes left by aliens, it's MY RIGHT. I've been using this DNA since before I was born. Meanwhile, if I'm not mistaken, DNA theft is still perpetrated by the police every day.

It reminds me of a situation where a university (Berkeley, I think) planned to solicit volunteers from their students for some kind of DNA survey. Only to find out that some stupid regulation would prohibit them from letting the volunteers see their own results. It's insane.

School reinstates Facebooker who called teacher 'douche bag'

Pablo
FAIL

Oh the poor widdle teacher

It's hard to imagine how any statement short of claiming he intended to bring a gun to school could be described as "bullying" a teacher. Last I checked bullying normally required some kind of power imbalance. With the bully having more power that is, just to be clear, since some people are obviously foggy on this point.

Google algorithm change squashes code geek 'webspam'

Pablo
Megaphone

Make it easier to report

I wish Google made it easy for users to report spam results. I certainly wouldn't suggest they automatically delist a site just because a few people report it (you can easily imagine that being abused against political sites and so forth), but surely those reports could be very useful in combination with Google's algorithmic magic.

Gatwick Airport security swoops on 3-inch rifle

Pablo
Coat

Hmmm

Perhaps if the pilot had only one eye, and you held it really close to their face, they would think it was full sized.

O2's free Wi-Fi in detail: How free is free exactly?

Pablo
WTF?

I don't get it

If they're not trying to limit it to either smart phones or their own customers, what is the purpose of requiring the use of text messaging? They just want everybody to carry an extra device?

Apple $10k winner hangs up on 'prank caller'

Pablo

So, 10 apps then.

Not so fatal.

Lawyer wants WikiLeaker kept off suicide watch

Pablo
Unhappy

Sure sounds like torture to me

I don't suppose the Geneva Convention applies to your own soldiers though.

Tunisia: Goodbye Ben Ali, hello (internet) freedom

Pablo

Well, good.

I wish my president followed through on promised change so quickly.

ISPs battle EU child pornography filter laws

Pablo
FAIL

Is this sarcastic?

This is such spectacularly bad idea, I have to hope it's a joke. If there's one policy what would actually be worse then censorship, this is it. To put it in perspective, even notoriously repressive governments like China and Saudi Arabia don't usually do this.

It might sound okay when you assume it's only going to happen to "those guys", but when you stop to think about all the ways this could go horribly wrong, it should become apparent why nobody does it.

Mum arrested for seducing teen on Xbox Live

Pablo

My guess

And is is only a guess, is that she's very immature socially and/or mentally herself and doesn't related well with adults.

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